Featured Money Maker Of The Month:
Learn the techniques I used to make over $4,000,000 in affiliate commissions! Check out my Free Affiliate Marketing Guide and learn the "how to" for Facebook Ads, PPC Affiliate Marketing, PPV / CPV Affiliate Marketing, And Media Buying!
In affiliate marketing, it's really easy to make a one page site, throw up 100 links on the page all going to your affiliate link, throw up a quick google campaign and be making some cash eventually.
Sadly, these type of campaigns usually don't last. They usually die out quickly from a google slap or become unprofitable from copy cat sites.
The main focus of the projects I want to work on are more long term. Long term campaigns are usually in niches that have been around for a while. These are not going to be instantly profitable in most cases and certainly are going to take work.
The nice thing about them though is that once you have them dialed in and running consistent profit, you are set for a while!
Consistent income is built through hard work while instant short term income is built through slapping things together.
Which is best?
For myself personally, I like to run a mixture of both campaigns. There are certain campaigns that I know I can make a nice easy extra bit of income off of with minimal work. These campaigns are short term only. I don't expect them to last very long. I make as much profit as possible and let them die when they die. I don't revisit them after they are dead.
I also like to focus on building up content driven, good quality pages. These are sites that are not just a single landing page. These sites have actual content and are in solid (fairly) hard to get in niches. If other people are making it work, why can't we?
So all that being said, don't focus your affiliate business on creating JUST short term websites. In the end, you'll be much better off building real content driven affiliate websites that will create long term wealth for you. 
I though you focused on ling term only, but its good to hear that you try short terms campaigns for boosts in earnings.
jonathan, i couldnt agree more. sometimes it a bit of a gamble to see if you can get a niche site to work but if you can do it it really pays off. i tried building a site for a niche that was very saturated and failed miserably. still working the short term offers and working on building another niche site.
creating assets that produce income and adding them to your portfolio also give you more peace of mind and allow you to work on things without the stress of having to make money. great post!
Thats why Nick’s Weightloss blog will keep on going even after that acai fad dies away… he will just keep loosing more weight… and somehow find a way to put it back on to blog again
Longterm can be difficult — I remember working on a vacation/travel site for 6 months before seeing anything come out of it.
Personally I like to take everything in the long run approach, it takes a special person though to set things up for the long run, because it really is so easy to let your brain talk you out of it and change up the focus of your website, campaigns, or whatever it is you are doing.
Long term for love, short term for a quick fbuck.
I prefer everything long term, my business projects are always planed to be long
Care to share any examples you have?
I also have to agree. Short term sites will get some cash flow into your business, but the long term sites will keep food on your table.
Also, if you are working PPC a long term site has possibilities of gaining traffic from SEO is better as well.
I also prefer to have a long term sites because I want it to be more profitable as years go by.
[...] Another niche feature of bigger niches is the fact that most of them have been around for a while, and they are going to continue to be around for a while! Smaller niches come and go and sometimes they come and go very very quickly! Bigger niches also tend to be a little more stable in terms of the profit they make then smaller niches for the most part! Jonathan Volk actually wrote a little post about this today, so instead of talking about it a lot, I’m just gonna link to his post about how niches that have been around a while are longterm. [...]
I only focus on long term sites. If I’m going to put the effort into something, I’d much rather keep benefiting from it for years to come. This strategy is based on the fact that I am better at seo than ppc. I really should improve my ppc skills and mix in some short term campaigns as well.
So by this post, you mean you do long term SEO campaigns with short term PPC campaigns?
How much hassle have you had personally from copycat sites?
Well I guess it simply a quality site requires a long term and constant effort.
It’s important to diversify. The long term plans, while they take more work upfront, will make you money more consistently. Wouldn’t you rather have a steady income for a year than have to keep putting up pages that don’t provide enough money to cover your budget for a week?
[...] Campaigns – I was reading a post by Jonathan Volk; I’ll give you the link to it now: Quality Sites are Long Term - This gives you a brief summary of how long term sites are more profitable than quick hit [...]
I think that is also good to have have a long term sites as it will give more profit for long term.
[...] Another nice feature of bigger niches is the fact that most of them have been around for a while, and they are going to continue to be around for a while! Smaller niches come and go and sometimes they come and go very very quickly! Bigger niches also tend to be a little more stable in terms of the profit they make then smaller niches for the most part! Jonathan Volk actually wrote a little post about this today, so instead of talking about it a lot, I’m just gonna link to his post about how niches that have been around a while are longterm. [...]
But how do you pick long-term niches that aren’t already heavily dominated?
Oh, and btw, the javascript on your comment form removes my name/email/url onfocus…